My Experience Part II/Student Debt
Being a Master’s student at UVA was at once familiar and strange. I slipped back into certain parts of it with ease and with joy after two years away from college classrooms. Coursework in grad seminars was one such element of the experience. The classes were exactly like seminars at Sarah Lawrence, but with slightly different reading material (there was more theory and scholarship).
Something significantly different was that my time in this MA program was in many ways the commencement of an adult life for me. After Sarah Lawrence, I had moved back in with my parents, so I was now, in Charlottesville, paying my own rent for the first time. On top of this, I took out student loans to cover both the tuition for the Master’s degree and cost of living during my first year in the program when I was without a job (I taught during my second year).
I had had the extraordinary good fortune of a pair of supportive parents, both elementary school teachers, who had covered the cost of my undergraduate education at an expensive private liberal-arts college, and had come out of Sarah Lawrence with no student debt. Now, though, I would be financially responsible for continuing my education.
By the end of my two years at UVA, I owed almost $50,000 in loans for tuition and cost-of-living. And I don’t believe that I should have had to take out those loans to get that Master’s degree.
It is obviously an incredible form of privilege and class advantage to receive a Master’s degree. As of 2018, 13% of Americans over the age of 25, and 9% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 30, had a Master’s degree and/or doctorate and/or professional degree (Census Bureau). It is an even more remarkable form of privilege to get such a degree in a humanistic discipline that one loves studying. I feel profound gratitude for having been able to do so, and yet I nevertheless feel that I should not have had to pay for the degree.
Nathan J. Robinson, author and editor-in-chief of the left-wing magazine Current Affairs, frequently writes in his columns and books that our response to the status quo ought not to be proportioned to historical realities, or take its point of departure solely from our own relative privilege within that status quo, but ought to be motivated by discrepancies between what is possible and what is actual in the here-and-now, and the consequences of that discrepancy.
Anecdotally, I have not yet spoken to a single recipient of a Master’s degree in English who would recommend getting one if you have to take out loans to do so. Despite numerous positive experiences in the programs and sometimes indisputable benefits to having the degree, this remains the case. This feels like something worth a very serious conversation.
As I think about what is possible, it feels firmly possible for all such public education as mine was, to be completely tuition-free.
I also believe that public colleges and universities, rather than private ones, ought to be the norm for higher education, and that even at private institutions, much could be done to get us towards a state of affairs where such degrees as the one I received are tuition-free.
All education in Finland, from pre-kindergarten and high school through college, graduate school, and professional degrees such as JDs and MDs, is publicly-financed, and tuition-free. There are certain exceptions: a handful of Waldorf, non-Finnish language, and religious schools do exist, but they all require a license from the Finnish government, are required to follow the Finnish national core curriculum, and all must be publicly financed through taxes. Only a handful are allowed to charge a small tuition of a few hundred U.S. dollars (Partanen 118).
Many MA programs which charge tuition are highly valued sources of revenue for their departments (with tuition from an English MA funding the English department in which it was offered). This invites larger conversations about funding for the humanities writ large; if these disciplines were more secure overall, would they need such systems?
Notes-
Census Bureau: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2018/demo/education-attainment/cps-detailed-tables.html
Partanen, Anu. The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life. New York, Harper, 2016.
